Pat Dollard | Young Americans

An “awakening“? Life in the stagnant, sludge-stained pond that is Hollywood?

‘Airplane!’ director eyes Michael Moore

by JEFFREY RESSNER - (Politico)

The comedy director who gave us such immortal movie lines as “Oh stewardess, I speak jive” and “Don’t call me Shirley” is now leveling his sights at documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.

David Zucker, the director and writer who helped create “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun” franchise has called on Hollywood’s tiny but tightly knit Republican A-list crowd to help him make a broad yet unusually right-leaning political satire titled “An American Carol.”

The low-budget indie co-stars Emmy winner Kelsey Grammer with Oscar-winner Jon Voight, cinema icon Dennis Hopper, model-heiress Paris Hilton and frequent Zucker stooge Leslie Nielsen in minor roles. Release is planned sometime by year’s end; the director suggested Friday, Sept. 12, to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Zucker and his associates have been keeping the film under fairly tight wraps for months. When hyping the usual casting updates to showbiz trades, those associated with the production would only describe the movie as “a spoof of ‘A Christmas Carol’ and contemporary American culture,” avoiding any mention of its political perspective.

Zucker had, however, mentioned the project to a handful of reporters and talk radio hosts, telling one columnist at the Wisconsin State Journal, “It outdoes any movie I have ever done in tasteless, offensive, un-PC humor.”

(Spoiler alert: The passages below reveal some plot details, and all of the scenes are subject to change before release.)

As with many of Zucker’s earlier films, his latest japefest is loaded with sight gags and a litany of one-liners, but there are few sacred cows. Along with many Muslim terrorists named Mohammed, even severely handicapped children are subject to the film’s screwball comedy. Jimmy Carter shows up for a brief razzing, but far more relevant Dems, including Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, seem conspicuous in their absence.

Instead, Zucker (with co-writer Myrna Sokoloff) mocks the usual conservative targets: ACLU attorneys, liberal colleges and anti-war protesters. The movie saves its most severe scorn for the main character, a slovenly documentary filmmaker based on Oscar winner Michael Moore. The attack is literally scorched-earth style: In a climactic scene, Moore’s stand-in (here named “Michael Malone”) finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Voight) hovers nearby.

Anarchist humor and conservative politics make for strange bedfellows. Another “Carol” scene takes place inside a portable toilet stall, where Malone is repeatedly slapped around by real-life Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, accompanied by the spirits of former President John F. Kennedy and World War II icon Gen. George Patton.

Using Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as a loose framework, Scrooge’s holiday humbuggery is replaced with Malone’s anti-American bias. Not only does the character attempt a boycott of the Fourth of July, but he also lends unwitting aid to jihadists plotting to blow up Madison Square Garden. Through the imagined interventions of Patton, the dead presidents and country singer Trace Adkins, Moore’s surrogate travels through history, eventually coming around to embrace patriotic values.

Malone is played by Kevin Farley, the younger brother of late “Saturday Night Live” cast member Chris Farley. Critics will surely debate the film’s humor and its politics, but one fact is indisputable: Farley is a devastating doppelganger for Michael Moore. As with Michael Chiklis playing John Belushi in the film version of “Wired,” however, it’s a performance that walks a Flying Wallenda-esque tightrope, balancing between uncanny impersonation and possible career suicide.

Maybe Moore himself will see the movie and feel for Farley. In the past, the filmmaker has mostly ignored his many detractors — though he’s said to have been particularly hurt by a previous film suggesting that he sympathized with terrorists. An assistant to Moore said he was not available to comment.

Zucker, who comes from a family of JFK Democrats, calls himself a “Sept. 11 Republican” who left his former party over national security issues. Since his own political turnaround, he has directed two enormously successful “Scary Movie” sequels and an Ashton Kutcher romantic comedy flop, in addition to a batch of unaired Republican National Committee ads and viral videos skewering Sen. John F. Kerry, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the Iraq Study Group. The videos appeared on YouTube.com and conservative blogs.

But Zucker has been mulling a big-screen mauling of Moore for years. He alluded obliquely to his movie project in a 2006 interview with conservative radio host Michael Medved and told the Los Angeles Jewish Journal around the same time, “You have people like Michael Moore going into foreign countries saying Americans are the stupidest people in the world. I want to tell the real America story, that America is a force for good.”

“An American Carol” is being distributed by Mpower Pictures, a company co-founded by former Mel Gibson protégé Stephen McEveety, who produced “The Passion of the Christ” and “Braveheart,” among other films. The indie firm recently hired conservative public relations firm Creative Response Concepts to help spread word to friendly outlets, as CRC did earlier with Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” and Walden Media’s “Chronicles of Narnia.” Perhaps best known for handling the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign during the 2004 presidential race, CRC’s other clients have included the Republican National Committee, the Christian Coalition and “intelligent design” hub the Discovery Institute.

Will “An American Carol” succeed where others have failed at the box office? It’s possible the film might reach a generally underserved audience, especially if pumped up by Fox, talk radio and other media. But it also faces at least a couple of hotly anticipated August comedies, “Pineapple Express” and “Tropic Thunder,” which will set the ha-ha bar higher for any future competitors.

Or will it simply get lumped in with the other half-dozen or so anti-Moore flicks: “Manufacturing Dissent,” “Michael Moore Hates America,” “Fahrenhype 9/11,” “Celsius 41:11,” “Me & Michael” and “Michael & Me”?
“An American Carol” will join a short list of right-tilting Hollywood creations, including John Milius’ “Red Dawn” and the marionette epic “Team America: World Police” from “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Remember, Moore had a big role in that comedy, too — his puppet figure was a suicide bomber who infiltrated the titular Team’s top-secret command post inside of Mount Rushmore and then destroyed the place by detonating his dynamite belt.

Laughing yet?